Category: Nuggets

In the forthcoming Book Towns, journalist Alex Johnson catalogues these most charming of tourist destinations. He spoke to Atlas Obscura about the pleasures of out-of-the-way places defined by their books.

Hay-on-Wye, in Wales, was the first one, and it started in 1977. How have book towns changed over the past few decades?

Increasingly, computational linguists are able to detect patterns in how our moods are expressed in words. It’s not just the obvious, such as saying, “I’m happy or I’m sad,” but over- and underuse of classes of words.

Searching the ‘words’ of those suffering depression shows overrepresentation of ‘negative’ words as might be expected but also overuse of the pronoun ‘I’. Now, skewed patterns also include ‘absolutist’ vocabulary:

Our lab recently conducted a big data text analysis of 64 different online mental health forums, examining over 6,400 members. “Absolutist words” – which convey absolute magnitudes or probabilities, such as “always”, “nothing” or “completely” – were found to be better markers for mental health forums than either pronouns or negative emotion words.

The fact is that the scarcity mentality and the perpetual warrior style it demands are incompatible with any civilized political creed.

This quote comes from today’s New York Times opinion piece by David Brooks. It exemplifies how a big thought yields powerful writing. His concept of the world shifting from a philosophy of abundance to one of scarcity is an idea of the times. A massive idea that makes for a deeply memorable short piece. Massive ideas packed into small spaces are the stuff of Pulitzer’s. How will your writing change how the world thinks — and sees itself?

The biggest cliché about clichés is that they are not original and therefore should be avoided at all costs. It is a statement full of good intentions – as is typical of the clichés – but that leaves out a very important point: every cliché was an original idea.